Owler vs. SellHack

This is a free service, so it should be compared to free and low cost alerting (e.g. Google Alerts) and PE/VC funding profile (e.g. Crunchbase) services. Owler is well suited for competitive intelligence professionals, named account reps, and marketing professionals tracking company news (web mined company mentions and press releases) and social media (blogs, Video, YouTube). The alerts are high precision and tag for three key events (M&A, Funding, Exec Changes). It is the alerting and social media tools which are the key strength of the service. The company claims two million profiles, but only has 60,000 with full address information. Content includes competitors, user polls, and funding / M&A data. Owler should be viewed as a free complement to other online company research tools, but it lacks the depth to replace subscription services. Missing content includes long business descriptions; financials and discrete sizing data; family tree linkage, and executive profiles (only the CEO is covered) While they offer list building functionality, it is quite thin and non-downloadable. As such, I would not recommend Owler for sales and marketing prospecting at this point. A unique feature is a set of company polls about the direction of the company and CEO performance. Unfortunately, the response rates are often too low to be statistically meaningful.

SellHack is great for anyone who is in sales or whose work requires the need to build lists or to search for missing email addresses. Many businesses and social media sites provide email addresses, but of course depending upon industry many do not, so SellHack is my go to tool when I absolutely have to find an email.

Incentivized

• Owler enables the user to quickly find the data and information that he or she needs.
• I appreciate the customizable dashboard where you can set alerts and track companies you select.
• The latest news regarding the funding rounds of startup companies is especially helpful.
• The top competitors to companies provided by Owler often give me a great point of reference for my competitive analysis.

Incentivized

• Often I'll be searching for an email address, so I'll go to LinkedIn, ZoomInfo, Sales Navigator. These are all services the my firm pays for me. But inevitably I will need another sure fire source and SellHack is my go to tool, it will find email addresses often when I can't find them anywhere else.
• I use Hunter also, but many times I found addresses on SellHack that I couldn't find on Hunter.
• I love that you can subscribe and purchase various levels of searches per month, or if you want you can buy x amount of searches that don't expire.
• SellHack has a nice Chrome extension that stays on top so when I'm searching I can click on it from the pull down and enter the data and copy/paste the results into my CRM.

Incentivized

• The information provided is useful but at times the variation with other websites and tools is substantial which makes it difficult to rely solely on owler
• Information only about bigger companies is available not for smaller and research on smaller ones are important as there are not many tools that do that
• There are few companies that appear as defunct or do not exist but in the actual market there is a lot going on with them and being in market intelligence industry owler needs to capture that
• It would be great if they provide revenue or growth of the in the past three years or so. As it would save our time and efforts to some extent
• They need to maintain the database in aperiodic manner with precise information

Incentivized

• I wish they had a roll over feature for unused credits on the subscription.
• SellHack is great for list building, and export to popular CRMs like Salesforce.
• If you have an email address and you're not sure if it's accurate, SellHack will verify the address and give you a percentage rating on their confidence that the address works (a percentage rating is given for all email searches).
• I love their referral program: Give 50, Get 50: Refer a friend and you both get 50 free credits! I've used this many times.

Incentivized

Not really an applicable question as this is a free service, but if they charged $100 / year (GageIn's price) I would still license the service.

I think it's well designed but always room for improvement. Maybe more customization in layout or information presented. Maybe even a layout that allows comparison and ranking of companies in a similar industry or vertical, or company size, and geography

Incentivized

I have yet to see the platform down or running slowly, but there have been multiple instances recently (Q2 2015) when the user links to a news story and Owler gives an Oops message. Users simply click on the story a second time and the story is displayed. This is a nuisance bug. I also have a sense that the system is not processing alerts as quickly as before, but I haven't tracked this closely, so I could be wrong about it.

The news precision, which is the most important feature for me, is very accurate. They have editors review the news to ensure it is properly tagged by company and event type.

Problems have been closed quickly and professionally.

Focus on setting up companies that have limited news coverage first. Public companies are well covered and it is easy to track them. Furthermore, the surfeit of news around public companies can crowd out smaller companies with less news. It is smaller companies where you are most likely to see a benefit in their tracking of news, blogs, press releases, and videos.

I believe Lead411 and Owler go hand in hand, rather than one over the other. I believe Lead411's contact generation is far stronger based on the cost, but Owler allows you to broaden your horizon for prospecting whereas Lead411 is more of a user-driven search rather than an platform-driven search.

Incentivized

Hunter and ZoomInfo are two services that I also use to find email addresses. Generally if I can't find it on one of those SellHack will find it for me, never the other way around. I use them all, but SellHack is my secret weapon.

Incentivized

• The personalisation of emails has definitely helped us to earn a higher reply rate, with the knock-on that this will be helping with future deals.
• Keeps us very relevant in our conversations with contacts. They are often impressed by the research and knowledge we have on their company and how we have aligned ourselves to help. Again, small differences at the start of calls but this will be helping with the number of opportunities created.
• Reduces SDR prospecting time. Quick and easy to get updates allowing them to process a great number of accounts on a daily basis.

Incentivized

• It's been vital. I've made too many contacts to mention because I was able to source the correct email address for C-suite executives (which are my target prospects).
• The cost of the service has been affordable. I work inside sales and so I have to be selective on which tools I pay for because the ROI must fit within my budget. I've used SellHack since day one in this role and I use it every month.

Incentivized